Woodstock artist Eugene Ludins' works on display at museum

ALBANY -- Inked figures swallowing swords, painted groups huddled against the hands of authority and a variety of wide-open pastoral scenes are the focus of a new exhibit at the State Museum.

On Saturday, the walls of the West Gallery came alive with a lifetime of representations by Eugene Ludins, a member of the Maverick artist colony in Woodstock. The exhibit, Eugene Ludins: An American Fantasist, displays more than 60 paintings and drawings from throughout the artist's 70-year career, from his beginnings at Woodstock to his deployment to the Pacific Theater of World War II, a professorship in Iowa and final return to Woodstock.

Born in Russia in 1904, Ludins and his family migrated the same year to America, where he would eventually study at the Art Students League in New York City. Manifesting the art school ideals of communal growth, Ludins moved to Woodstock to hone his craft by becoming part of the Maverick colony, a growing bohemian community.

Ludins lived in rustic simplicity, without electricity or indoor plumbing, but was fully engaged in a vibrant artistic and intellectual community. There, he inked whimsical scenes, painted studio scenes and self-portraits in his signature style, while scraping by a living during the Depression years.

It was at the Maverick colony in 1932 that he met Hannah Smalls, a talented sculptor, while rehearsing Scheherazade, one of the the colony's many theatrical productions. Before and after their marriage in 1937, Smalls would influence Ludins' growth as a painter.

While at the colony, his concern with war themes, which he began depicting with Spring Thaw (1932), gradually grew, paralleling the series of events escalating toward war in Europe. In 1944, at the age of 40, Ludins enlisted in the Army Ambulance Corps and was shipped to the Pacific Theater, serving as a field director of the American Red Cross. He was based on Okinawa during the 82-day-long battle that began in April 1944, and the horrors he saw there would strongly influence his artistic career for the next decade and to some extent for the rest of his life.

In 1948, at the apex of his notoriety while still living, Ludins was offered and took a professorship at the University of Iowa. With visions of the war still in his head, his paintings became increasingly politically charged, moving from the quotidian scenes and fanciful meanderings of his output before the war, to scenes showing a "helpless humanity at the mercy of power and authority," wrote Curator Susana Torruella Leval.

The often sinister paintings of this period show huddled masses beset by the threat of the hydrogen bomb, picnics amidst noxious fumes, or tackle the Suez Canal crises, the Korean War and anti-communist McCarthy investigations. On weekends and school breaks Ludins and Smalls would paint and sculpt in towns along the Mississippi and the Gulf Coast. During these trips, Ludins would create large-scale pastoral scenes of a dreamy, carefree world, creating a strong juxtaposition with his "problem pictures," as Smalls would dub many of his politically charged paintings.

In 1969, the couple moved back to Woodstock, and to a world changed by the student protests of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and the feminist movement. There, Ludins would live out most of the rest of his life.

Concluding the exhibit are Ludins' ribald, fanciful drawings, showing his "natural penchant for fantasy and observation of human nature," writes Leval. These witty depictions, perhaps the most striking aspect of the exhibit, show the artist's empathy and wit, finding gentle humor in humanity's imperfections. They, perhaps more than any of this other works, may serve to underscore the exhibit's opening statement: "His way was strange and unique and yet distinctively American, with a curious edge and an affecting humanity." However, as with any description of a two-dimensional representation, that statement's truth is best perceived for one's self.

Eugene Ludins: An American Fantasist will be open in the West Gallery of the State Museum through May 12, 2013. An opening reception will be held at the Museum on Saturday, March 2 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.